Think about being useful

We have arrived at a point where “making money” has become completely unmoored from “performing a societally useful task”—so much so that the previous sentence will make no sense to most people.

The will ask: What does doing something useful have to do with making money? You need money to live; ergo, you come by it any old way. Whether you “deserve” it doesn’t enter into it.

An obvious and egregious example is the exponentially increasing “hustle economy”, featuring “influencers” whose postings have little to nothing to do with reality and are nearly exclusively about selling products that they pretend not to be explicitly promoting.

It’s like cable-shopping channels taken to their logical extreme. Of course, they’re lying about their appearance and their circumstances. That’s how they get you to buy their stuff. They are, in this way, no different from crypto-enthusiasts, whose only plan for making their investments work is to convince other fools to follow them into their madness.

We’re so institutionalized at this point that we’re left hoping for honesty from partakers in a so-called profession called “influencing” that apparently consists entirely of taking pictures of yourself non-stop, all day long.

Instead of declaring war on what is clearly a societally detrimental mass-psychosis cum mental illness, we have become so numbed to this assault on culture and society that we allow it to be deemed the future of work and a replacement for all other forms of culture or creativity.

Given the base uselessness of it all, what does it matter if they touch up or falsify their pictures? The problem isn’t that the pictures are fake. The problem is that they won’t stop taking pictures of themselves, all day long, every day. The problem is that this is the sum-total of their contribution to society—taking pictures of themselves in various locations and hawking overpriced, low-quality wares.

People have a supercomputer in their pocket, with a ludicrously good camera and they use it to take pictures of themselves all day and post 3-second videos to TikTok. The rest of the time they’re doom-scrolling or envy-scrolling or FOMO-scrolling through generated newsfeeds of other influencing fools or outright faked content produced by bots working for advertising companies.

It’s either that, or they’re sending simple, insipid text messages to groups.

They don’t do research, they don’t learn, they don’t create. They play games and observe low-quality content created by corporations bent on extracting their money in exchange for low-quality and largely useless or overpriced goods. Shopping for makeup one doesn’t need and can barely afford—promoted by millionaires and billionaires on Instagram—has become the pinnacle of modern culture.

This cultural trend is a virus that rewards those without talent or useful creativity with continued success. The mechanism for rewards has broken down because it is so easily manipulated.

A recent example across which I stumbled is from How to Tell My Boss She’s a Bad Writer?. It’s not clear whether the story is true (it’s the Internet, so it’s all fake), but it’s an extremely plausible hypothetical, at the very least.

“I’ve been recently hired as an editor for a small, start up publishing house. I’ve worked on a few manuscripts so far, and my boss has liked my work/appreciated my input. A few days ago, she sent me her next unpublished book to edit. I know she has already published several, but I have yet to read them. Guys, the writing is AWFUL. She keeps switching back and forth between past and present tense for no reason, doesn’t know how to do a simple dialogue tag, apparently has never heard of a run on sentence… Not to mention, the story itself is just poorly told. The writing is incredibly juvenile. If this manuscript had passed over my desk, I honestly would have denied it after the first 3 pages. As a reader, I would have put it down after the first. I like my boss. I like how she operates, I like how she treats me, I like how she pays. How do I tell her that her writing is terrible?”

The author of the comment is working as an editor for a self-published writer who very clearly can’t write, but who probably self-promotes like an absolute angel, convincing people who can’t read to buy their books. The person who can read and write and edit and work with the language ends up working for person who’s able to connect to the masses much better.

In the end, the content produced will be of no lasting value and will provide no great insight. It will be part of the micro-plasticization of culture, the floodwaters of inanity and mundanity under which the 21st-century will slip and drown without a trace.